Here’s the first part of our findings from a brilliant research project that we worked on for the Children’s Commissioner.
It’s all about best practice in student voice, and here’s a short ‘How to’ guide with as much advice as we could possibly fit onto two pages. Feel free to download and share.
You can download here: [download id=”237″]
The research came from in-depth research in 16 schools across England who have great student voice, and looking at the values, principles and practices that underpin their success. Great to see so many and varied benefits that schools are seeing. There’s a full report to be issued in a few weeks.
Thank you to the schools that took part, and for the Children’s Commissioner for getting us in to do such a great project!
Loads of school council elections are taking place across the country, but many of them aren’t organised as well as they could be.
Often this is perfectly understandable; running the election is sometimes thrust upon an unsuspecting teacher, so here’s a complication of the resources we’ve got to help you out!
1. A set of 15 minute short tutor time activities to help plan a school council election:
3. Our school council reps toolkit might help students understand what’s involved as a school councillor (sometimes if they’re not sure what’s involved, they won’t put themselves forward).
A couple of great pupil voice resources found their way in to my inbox yesterday (thanks to Google Alerts) that I think are really worth sharing.
The first is from the amazing Wroxham School (@wroxhamschool). It outlines some of the ways Wroxham has been using pupil voice to enhance creativity in their curriculum. If you haven’t used Prezi before, just click the play button to move from ‘slide’ to ‘slide’:
I really wish there was a way I could remove that last image.
I visited Wroxham School as part of our research for the Office of the Children’s Commissioner and they really do do some inspiring stuff.
The next resource is a write-up from a Archbishop Benson CE VA Primary School in Cornwall of how they set up a ‘Learning Detectives’ scheme to give pupils more control of their learning. I really love the way they’ve matched up the animals with different aspects of being a good learner.
We helped make this series of six videos for Parliament’s Education Service. As well as encouraging schools to enter the Speaker’s School Council Award they contain loads of great tips from MPs and school councillors of all ages on how to make any project a success.
If your school council or project team is getting a bit stuck have a watch of some of these, they might just give you a few ideas.
Why enter the Speaker’s School Council Award
Getting ideas and choosing a project
Planning your project
Keeping your team on track
Keeping people informed and involved
Evaluating your project
These videos were all shot, directed and edited by the fantastic Kwame Lestrade of Franklyn Lane Films.
I think Twitter is an amazing resource and tool for teachers; I encourage all teachers I work with to join up. It gives you a quick, simple way to interact with colleagues and subject experts from outside your school and across the world. You find out what new things they’re trying, what’s working in their classrooms and what issues they’re facing. You can get help, give help and join in the debate.
… but there’s something missing …
The voice of students.
Today I was introduced by @ssat to @SchoolReport a student tweeting about his/her education and school life.
But that’s just one voice, wouldn’t it add so much to your teaching and learning if you also heard from students what was working for them, what wasn’t, the troubles and successes in their classrooms across the world. Asking them why would be very powerful. We’re all aware of the benefits for learners and teachers of getting learners to reflect on how they’re learning, asking for that to be open and enabling students and teachers to enter into conversations with each other about it would be a huge win all round.
I guess student tweeters could go down one of two routes:
Open tweeting (using your own name). If you’re confident in yourself, your school and your teachers to be mature about how feedback is given and taken.
Secret tweeting (using a pseudonym). This may be more comfortable (and fun), but I think if you’re going to go down this route you need to make sure you also don’t reveal the identity of your school, your teachers or your classmates.
So I’m not sure exactly how, but I think we need a concerted campaign to encourage more student tweeters (or should that be ‘twitterers’).
The first little step on Twitter tends to be a #hashtag, so I’ll suggest #svtweet (student voice tweet). Students already using Twitter or anyone wishing to start could tag any tweets about education or school #svtweet.
I wrote this little pocket guide for the school councils of some secondary schools I’m working with. It should be useful to anyone who’s interested in becoming a rep (representative) or is one already and wants some tips on how to make a good job of it.
Most schools have reps as part of the way they run student voice, often class reps, year or house council reps and then even school council reps who might meet with people from other schools.
But being a rep’s not easy, so here are some tips and guides on how to do it well.
Inside you’ll find answers to all of these questions:
What is a rep (representative)?
What’s good student voice?
What does a rep do?
How do I collect views?
How do I create change?
How do meetings work?
What should I ask in meetings?
How do I run a meeting?
What are minutes?
Can meetings be fun?
How do I present an idea?
How do we get things done?
It’s designed as an A5 booklet so if you print it our double-sided onto A4 all the pages should match up
Download the PDF here:
[download id=”220″]
As with all of our work, we release it under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence, so if you want to remix it – add your own logos, etc. – you can do that with the Publisher files here:
